With new servers being added this week and many people crying for idle kick features it seems to me that there is a fairly simple and relatively free solution to all of our population issues. Do away with the JP/NA/EU server designations. Think about it: right now we have what, 25 JP servers and 25 NA/EU servers. Our NA servers (when running optimally and without thousands of people sitting afk for fear of not being able to get back in) experiences a "prime time" when the majority of our playerbase wants to log in, generally something like 4pm to midnight depending on which NA timezone you are in. After this primetime is over server loads and populations drop dramatically and most of what is valuable space goes relatively unused. This is where mixing the JP and NA servers would really shine.

This point might be best illustrated by throwing some numbers out. All numbers used here are strictly for illustrative purposes and are not backed by any empirical data.

Lets use the magical 5,000 that so many people refer to as the max number of concurrent players on a server. There are far more than 5,000 players who want to utilize this server, but only 5,000 are allowed to be on at any given time. If SE has allowed 10,000 players on each server that leaves 5,000 online and 5,000 waiting to get on, thus login queues and/or 1017 errors. This leaves a lot of people frustrated with not being able to get in.

But if we consolidate servers....

Ultros (NA) and Ridill (JP) each have 10,000 players on their server with a limit of 5,000 concurrent. If we take half of the Ultros people and move them to Ridill and vice versa we still maintain the 10,000 players per server but since half of the population logs in during our primetime and the other half logs in during the middle of the night/early morning there are in theory never any login issues or queues. This server keeps the 10,000 player population but this population now consists of 5,000 NA and 5,000 JP.

By doing away with the JP/NA designations you effectively spread populations evenly across the existing servers alleviating our login issues

There is no need to create new servers or develop and implement an idle kick system, we have all the resources we need. We just need to optimize what we have not try to expand into something bigger or newer.

____________________________

Gadhelyn wrote:

This one time at FFXIV camp I tried to get a 3 person party going, but just ended up as a Disciple of the Hand.